Hands on: Zoomii breathes life into Amazon’s bookshelves

Miss the comfy chairs and endless aisles of knowledge your local bookstore …

The web has revolutionized many aspects of the modern shopping experience, but it has never been able to recreate the pleasure of wandering a book store's shelves in search of literary adventure. Sure we can search, nay paddle, through a sea of books at Amazon and save 20 percent on toilet paper if we buy a package with two or more books, but the sheer pleasure of leisure browsing the local bookseller have been lost in translation when viewed through a browser. This is why Ars Technica went hands on with Zoomii, a new service that hopes to bring some of the visual thrill back to browsing books online.

Zoomii, in a nutshell, is a visual bookshelf browser for over 19,000 books from Amazon's catalog, though it can search for over 162,000 titles. Instead of browsing through flat lists of book titles and their cold statistics, Zoomii stacks books in shelves alphabetically by author, organized by genre. You can click and drag across Zoomii's landscape of shelves, zoom in and out with your scrollwheel, and click a book's cover for basic statistics from Amazon, including the ability to add the book to your cart or wishlist. We aren't quite sure how Zoomii picks the books that stock its shelves, but some kind of system that picks through a combination of top sellers and new releases is a safe bet.

A few aisles of Zoomii's bookstore, complete with an almost-empty bookshelf and even a bargain section

Utilizing JavaScript in the browser, Java on Linux servers, and Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, Zoomii's attempt to bring the bookshelf back to the online bookstore experience is a novel—and mostly successful—experience. Scrolling across Zoomii's shelves is snappy, and book images render in crisp detail surprisingly quickly. Clicking a book's cover displays a higher-res version and plenty of details instantly, and all refreshingly without a single drop of Flash.

When was the last time you could get a view like this of Barnes & Noble's isles?

Zoomii is developed by a single developer, Chris Thiessen. On Zoomii Inc.'s site, Thiessen explains his inspiration for what appears to be not much more than his longing experiment: "Online bookstores are wonderful. They've got amazing prices, huge selections, and they're open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they're perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse," Thiessen continues. "Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible." There's no word on whether the comforting smell of fresh hardcover pages is next on Zoomii's to-do list.

The detail view for a book with all the basic necessities

Of course, Zoomii's very narrow scope of Amazon's endless catalog limits the site's utility and appeal. Zoomii can only display 19,000 books and search a total of 162,000, and Amazon could always cut Thiessen off if his clever experiment begins demanding too much in the way of hardware and bandwidth resources. Still, being able to actually browse bookshelves, to the extent that the digital realm allows in this form, is a novel experience, one that is pleasant enough for us to have a little hope that Amazon takes a liking to Zoomii and scoops it up.